A hospital website has an unusual job. Four people arrive on the same homepage wanting four incompatible things, and one of them is in a car with a bleeding relative. Design that fails here is rarely ugly. It is built as an organisation chart when it needed to be a set of routes. This is the blueprint, in the order the screens get drawn.
The homepage routes four visitors
The emergency. Wants a number to dial and an address to read out to a driver. Both above the fold, tappable, without a scroll or a menu tap.
The OPD appointment. Wants to know which consultant sits which day, and how to book. Needs a route into the department and doctor structure, not a slider.
The report or record. An existing patient after a test result, a bill or a discharge summary. Sends more traffic than hospitals expect, and gets a footer link labelled Patient Portal.
The attendant travelling in. Coming from Malda or Siliguri. Needs distance from Sealdah and Howrah, where to stay, whether reports can be sent ahead.
Four routes, four visible entry points. Everything else is decoration.
Department IA, and how deep it should nest
Two levels below the department, not five. Department, then the conditions it treats, then procedures, with consultant profiles cross-linked rather than nested. Nobody should be four taps from what they came for.
The department page carries the consultants who sit there, the conditions handled, the equipment a referring physician cares about, OPD days and the admission path.
The consultant profile is a template
The most-visited page type on a hospital site, and the least designed. Fixed slots: photograph, full name with the variants people search, qualifications written out, registration details, speciality, training history, procedures personally performed, languages spoken, OPD hours per unit, links to the conditions treated. One booking block, in the same place every time. Design it once, properly, because inconsistency across a hundred profiles reads as neglect.
Appointment booking, and the eleven-field form
A form asking for name, age, sex, address, city, PIN code, email, phone, department, preferred doctor, date, time and a captcha loses to a phone number printed in large type. Reliably.
Three fields convert: name, mobile, what it is about. The rest can be asked on the callback. Put the number beside the form rather than under it, because many patients want a human and will not trust a form to reach anyone. Make the confirmation state explicit, because a form that silently clears itself gets submitted twice. A booking engine with live slots earns more fields; an email-to-reception form does not.
Emergency and ambulance information
Not on a Contact page, not in a dropdown.
The emergency number, the ambulance number and the emergency entrance directions belong in the header on every page and again in the footer, as tap-to-call links. Write directions physically: which gate, which side of the road, where the ambulance bay is, whether the main gate is shut at night.
Timings and holiday hours as data, not a picture
Timings set in an image cannot be read by a screen reader, indexed, or updated by the receptionist who knows they changed. Put them in HTML with structured data behind them: per-consultant hours, per-department hours, laboratory collection, pharmacy if it runs separately. Then handle the exceptions, because Kolkata runs on them. Puja week, Kali Puja, Bhai Phonta, the Sunday half-day. A patient arriving to a closed counter writes a review, and the review outlives the holiday.
Accessibility and speed on the phone patients own
Assume a mid-range Android at default settings, held by someone in their seventies.
Tap targets no smaller than a fingertip, spaced apart, because adjacent links get mis-tapped by shaky hands. Text that scales when the phone's font size is set large, which means relative units and layouts that reflow rather than clip. Contrast strong enough for a scratched screen in daylight. Labels that stay visible instead of vanishing as placeholder text. Proper heading order, so a screen reader can move through discharge instructions. And no text baked into images, which excludes screen reader users and cannot be translated into Bengali.
Hospital sites also carry the heaviest homepages in the sector: video background, doctor carousel, building gallery. On a weak signal that is a blank screen. Lead with text, serve images at display size, and keep the emergency number in the initial markup so it renders first.
Multi-unit groups
One site, several hospitals, and a decision to settle early: unit first, or department first.
Department first works better, with unit availability shown inside it, because patients search a condition before they think about branches. Each unit still needs its own page with its own address, phone, timings and map matching its listing exactly. Consultants keep one canonical profile with per-unit OPD blocks rather than a duplicate per branch. For groups such as Poly Health and Sahayog Hospital Gondia, unit pages carry more traffic than the group homepage and should be the lightest on the site.
The device and supplies build is a different site
A medical device or surgical supplies business shares nothing with this blueprint beyond a domain. Lotus Surgicals and TI Medical sell to hospitals, procurement officers and distributors, so the structure is a catalogue: categories, then product pages carrying sizes, materials, sterilisation details, packing configuration and compliance documentation, plus a downloadable catalogue and a quotation enquiry form instead of an appointment path. No emergency routing, no OPD timings, no consultant profiles. Scope it separately, even when one group owns both.
Where this leads
Once the structure holds, search work has something to rank, which is where SEO for hospitals picks up. The condition pages this IA creates are what a consultant reuses for social media for doctors. Wider context is on the healthcare marketing hub; the build is our website development service.
Digi Kydo, 17R Dover Terrace, Ballygunge, Kolkata, West Bengal 700029. Call +91 98305 45687 or email [email protected].